The Talkies: Hats Off, Gentlemen
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES by James Bowman Hats Off, Gentlemen I t's a lucky thing for me that Whit Stillman, who is an old friend of The American Spectator, makes such good movies. If he made bad ones, I...
...This wonderful film's only partly mocking seriousness about such manifestations of pop cultural ephemera, which include disco itself, are of its very essence...
...James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...Des is on to Bernie's crooked ways, but he himself is being protected by a Harvard pal (Des is a dropout) called Josh (Matt Keeslar), now working in the D.A.'s office and compiling a case against Bernie, whose arrest for money-laundering and drugs comes at the film's climax...
...Ten years older now, they are working in New York and reinventing the courtship rituals that their parents regarded merely as hypocritical obstacles in the way of sexual gratification...
...Yet this drama, like the women's publishing careers, takes place quietly in the background of the sexual dance which is the apparent focus of all these disco-goers...
...Des is developing a bad cocaine habit and discarding the many women he sleeps with after he is tired of them by telling them that he thinks he is gay...
...More seriously, their single night of passion results in Alice's being infected with both gonorrhea and genital herpes...
...Barcelona (1994) was all that and more—an ambitious attempt to understand just what it meant to be an American among uncomprehending and sometimes contemptuous foreigners...
...She becomes an instant casualty of the sexual revolution with her first experience of love-making...
...says Josh, aghast...
...The jocular political language suggests ironic mockery of the politically engage 6o's generation, but there is also a serious point behind it for these orphans of the revolution...
...She herself, she says, often sings "Amazing Grace," and then proceeds to do so...
...At any rate, even Charlotte doesn't think of Josh's hymn-singing as all that unusual...
...As these examples may suggest, Still-man's subtle comedy of character and manners is of a quality which has hardly been seen in American movies since poor Preston Sturges breathed his last...
...Did you know that my senior paper was on Ernest Hemingway...
...And its purposes are not only satirical...
...The women are not involved in the working out of this masculine drama...
...Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire...
...Bowled Whit Stillman's wonderfully intelligent new film...
...Josh asks Alice, "Do you think I'm a wacko...
...The movie, he says, is designed to reinforce the female urge to date bad guys as an obviously bimbo-like Lady chooses the "self-confessed chicken thief and obvious sleazeball," Tramp...
...Set in "the very early 1980's," it is a warm, touching, funny look back at a time when the first young, educated generation to come to maturity after the social devastation of the 1960's and early 70's, tried in its own rather feckless and ramshackle way to reconstruct a social life...
...Alice and Charlotte are bitterly mocked by their colleague at work, Dan (Matt Ross), who fancies himself as a radical and a labor organizer...
...The next wave of young people to come along won't know that "disco was much more and much better than all that" — but our heroes believe that it will come back...
...No," says Alice with a smile...
...Jimmy is thus unwittingly assisting Josh's investigation of the club and completing a circle of problematical friendships and loyalties, as Jimmy depends on Des and Des depends on Josh...
...In one scene, for example, Josh takes the explicatory scalpel so memorably applied to The Graduate in Barcelona to Disney's Lady and the Tramp...
...Even now they are able to look forward to the ridicule that will attach to the clothes and some of the music and that campy John Travolta pose from Saturday Night Fever that everyone remembers about the period...
...Charlotte, in particular, sees the disco as a form of female empowerment and, surveying the crowds of men on the dance floor, remarks that "We're in complete control...Look out there...
...77 yes...
...You don't mean that...
...One can only guess at what proportion of today's movie-going audience will see the joke when Bernie says: "I care about ideas deeply...
...Like disco itself, her fragile "virtue" — just listen to the despicable Tom as he savors the word's quaintness on his tongue—never stood a chance against the crushing force of social anomie...
...Their circle of friends includes Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin), a young advertising executive who is building his career on his friendship with Des (Chris Eigeman), an assistant manager at a Studio 54 type club who can get him and sometimes the firm's clients in, despite the hostility to ad men of the doorman, Van (Burr Steers), and the sleazy club owner, Bernie (David Thornton...
...Witheringly, Tom says: "Is there no limit...
...Alice is shy, intellectual, conservative JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...The kids, especially the girls, cling for dear life to what few principles they have been able to salvage from the wreck of social order and decency...
...Orwhen radical Dan says of the girls' railroad apartment that "It was built for tenement families, and now the yuppie `roommates' are crowding them out...
...I thought his first film, Metropolitan (1990) was funny, clever, and charming...
...His characters are, in effect, the children of the wife-swapping 70's suburbanites in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (released last fall...
...Breathe through the heats of our desire Thy coolness and thy balm...
...Unfortunately, this does not prevent them from making bad choices once the "ferocious pairing off" begins...
...T his is a film of tremendous riches, particularly in the writing...
...in manners and is not even sure she likes the tart-tongued, amoral Charlotte, but they get an apartment together with Holly (Tara Subkoff)— a so-called "railroad apartment" in which all the rooms are in line and there is no hallway...
...Alice tries it out on Tom with instant success, only to learn that Tom had been attracted by her innocence...
...The number of those who will rock with merriment at the image of those poor tenement families—long since removed to the suburbs and upscale neighborhoods—starving outside in the snow cannot, one supposes, be large...
...If he made bad ones, I should have to be diplomatic, but that necessity has yet to arise...
...Best of all is the final paean to disco, after the closing of the club seems to herald its demise, from those who are given pause by the fact that they have "lived through a period that's over...
...He resents the fact that the girls' meager pay from the publisher is supplemented by allowances from their well-to-do parents and that they will probably marry rich professional husbands...
...There is a sly self-mockery in all this, as there is in having the final "pairing off" match the two couples who were obviously best suited to each other from the start...
...I will take no for an answer...
...The Last Days of Disco is his best yet...
...Josh is the spokesman for Still-man's own discomania, and the other characters are only less articulate believers that it is "tremendously important that there be more group social life and not all this ferocious pairing off" — which, even in their young lives, they have learned to look on with great suspicion...
...Okay...
...The coyness and playfulness of the gesture is itself a kind of allusion to the "old idea" of marriage which Alice, for understandable reasons, is beginning to think was best after all...
...Bernie's prejudice against ad men (they're too nice) proves justified as Jimmy is bringing the feds into the clubas clients—though neither Jimmy nor Bernie knows it...
...It is Des who tells the story of Josh's "breakdown" in college, which seems to have consisted of his once publicly singing that lovely hymn by Whittier which begins "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,/Forgive our foolish ways...
...Yet perhaps even Des is capable of being touched by the last two verses of the hymn, which go: Drop thy still dews of quietness, Till all our strivings cease: Take from our souls the strain and stress, And let our ordered lives confess The beauty of thy peace...
...Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire, 0 still, small voice of calm...
...Jimmy thinks he's just bringing in clients, characteristically forgetting that the IRS is the firm's biggest account...
...but the movie comes together with an ability to laugh at its own moral earnestness...
...The American Spectator • July 1 9 9 8 71...
...That way they pity and sympathize with him instead of cursing him...
...70 July 1998 • The American Spectator over to think that Tom (Robert Sean Leonard) is interested in her, the virginal and socially awkward Alice turns for advice to the more worldly-wise Charlotte, who gives her instructions in how to be seductive...
...Yet, also like disco, the film is very upbeat and admiring of these young people—even the less admirable ones—for having made an effort to live more ordered and gracious lives than might have been thought possible in a world where Josh is considered "a serious nut case" and sufferer from "religious mania...
...Here the humor is much more allusive and intellectual...
...As Josh says to Des, "I consider you a person of some integrity—except, you know, in your relations with women...
...E-mail him at JVBowman@compuserve.com...
...In the light of day, he is repulsed by her seductive patter, picked up from Charlotte, including her affecting to believe that Scrooge McDuck is "sexy...
...College friends Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) find themselves working for the same publishing company as assistant editors...
...There are a lot of choices...
...I particularly liked the bit where shy Josh warns Alice that "Some men say they won't take no for an answer, but I'm not like that...
...j osh, who is working to shut the club down, is the paradoxical theorist and self-described "loyal adherent of the disco movement...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS web site—http://www.spectator.org...
...The delicacy with which she punctures his rather charming self-conceit is Stillman's own, and is often applied to himself and his intellectual style of humor...
...These days, every third-rate disaster movie gets in comedy writers to drop one-liners in the script like raisins in a pudding...
...It was obviously meant to "program women to adore jerks...
...No," says Alice...
...She shakes her head no, then44 Like disco itself, her fragile 'virtue' never stood a chance against the crushing force of social anomie...
...Stillman's delicate balance between rueful regret and comic self-deflation is a triumph of tone that heralds his arrival as rare artist of the cinema...
Vol. 31 • July 1998 • No. 7
